Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and 14 current and former officials laundered money and committed other crimes in an alleged narco-terrorism conspiracy to "flood" the United States with cocaine, the Justice Department charged Thursday.

In a livestreamed news conference, U.S. Attorney General William Barr said Maduro and other political, judicial and military leaders across the Venezuelan government worked with Colombia's FARC rebels to ship 200 to 250 metric tons of the drug by air to locations in North America.

Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said the scheme operated for more than two decades and represented a deliberate attempt to "flood the United States with cocaine."

The move was seen as a largely unprecedented action against the leader of a foreign country, though the U.S. does not recognize Maduro as the legitimate president of Venezuela and pointedly referred to him as "former president."

Maduro was charged in Manhattan federal court with drug and weapons conspiracy, charges that carry a potential life sentence.

The New York case and others represented a concerted prosecution attack on Maduro as well as the chief judge of Venezuela's supreme court, leaders of the National Constituent Assembly and top leaders of the country's military leadership.

The announcement rounded up cases filed in New York, Miami, Washington, Texas and Arizona. A newly unsealed Miami case charged Venezuela's chief justice, Maikel Moreno Perez, with taking or scheming to take tens of millions of dollars in bribes to fix dozens of criminal and civil cases.

Moreno allegedly authorized the seizure and sale of a $100 million General Motors auto factory in exchange for a cut while reporting a $12,000 salary on a U.S. visa application.

Investigators charged they tracked $3 million in U.S. bank deposits to Moreno through shell companies plus about the same amount in spending on a private plane, $600,000 in credit and debit card purchases, shopping at Prada and Salvatore Ferragamo at the Bal Harbour Shops and $40,000 in payments to a Venezuelan beauty pageant director.

The Justice Department also looped in public-corruption charges filed last June in Miami against Venezuela's former electricity minister Luis Motta Dominguez and the utility's former procurement director, Eustiquio Lugo Gomez.

The State Department is offering millions of dollars in rewards for the capture and conviction of Maduro and his co-defendants, officials said.

"The Venezuelan regime, once led by Nicolás Maduro Moros, remains plagued by criminality and corruption," Barr said in a statement announcing the charges.

"Today's announcement is focused on rooting out the extensive corruption within the Venezuelan government — a system constructed and controlled to enrich those at the highest levels of the government," Barr said. "The United States will not allow these corrupt Venezuelan officials to use the U.S. banking system to move their illicit proceeds from South America nor further their criminal schemes."

Read the Miami complaint: